I'm a complete amateur with animation, but had a couple of thoughts about this anyway :) Is the viewpoint from above the floor all the time? If so............could you animate it by making the string as a very long narrow cylinder, keyframe the movement of the leading object, once it's disappeared through the hole you can start chopping off segments from the end of the 'string' and wobbling it a bit to make it look like it's moving. Does any of that make sense? The object that re-appears through the floor needn't be the same object that goes down the hole in the first place, could be a duplicate with a short string trailing, maybe easier to manipulate. Uhmmmmmmmm - can I explain what I mean a bit more clearly. Object #1 with long tail goes down the hole, once it's out of sight it can stop moving, and the string gets the end bits chopped off gradually the whole way through the animation, to simulate movement. At a certain point Object #2 re-appears trailing short length of string. Probably a daft idea, but it might throw up some workable ideas from someone else.

Alaska, eh? Brrrr.......(but there's nothing like being snowed in, nothing to do but tackle learning new software etc.) Happy Christmas to all :)

True. The beauty of 3DGS is that you suddenly find you've made a world with characters that walk round and make noises etc. Things start clicking into place mentally once you've had encouraging results!

MIlkshape can be used for adding bones and animation as well, and is pretty cheap.

Mike - maybe it was mentioned already in this thread............gmax is free, you can use it for making characters and doing some animating. A lot of people start in 3d by messing round with extras for existing games, customising existing models etc. Here's one link to the download - http://games.softpedia.com/public/cat/4/4-1.shtml but if that's not working a search on google for gmax free brings up loads of alternatives.

Wings Wings Wings and Carrara for splines, texturing, lighting etc. :)

I have both (well, Studio 2.1, not 3) but find it very hard to tear myself away from Bryce, because I love it so much, and also I mostly use it for terrain, the area it shines in :) I'm not that experienced, particularly in animation, so tend to use Bryce for animation because it's so easy, and you can load preset paths, or save your own paths to the library. Don't everyone shout at once and tell me that you can do the same with Studio 2 - you probably can, I just haven't been motivated to find out how to do it. For animating objects/humans or morphing I use Poser4, again 'cos it's so easy. And Bryce has easy-peasy multi-rep - just wish you could export native Bryce objects as .obj, then it would be truly fantastic.

Only useful for online games and VR worlds though, I think.

Hi Thalaxis I belong to a kind of cooperative of writers/concept artists/3d modellers, and our original intention was to make online games. We experimented with 3DGS, considering doing screenshot walk-thrus a bit like the original Myst. Then we looked at Wild Tangent, but at the time it was hard to figure out what it would cost, and it seemed complicated. We finally settled on Atmosphere. It's been beta up until now, version 1 has just been released. I think it's going to be a great program, if people bear 56k users in mind - if you're used to broadband it's hard to remember that not everyone can download 6MB just for curiosity. But it's possible to make any kind of game for online playing with it (I think). It will probably take a bit of time for it to settle completely, but it's got Adobe behind it. We feel it's going to be the one that becomes the standard, for all sorts of reasons - though Strata3d looks very good as well. Also I've seen nice stuff done in Director, but who can afford that :( Also, the movement was a bit sea-sickish in both Strata and Director compared to Atmosphere. Atmosphere is hooked up in some way with Viewpoint, which is a great technology, usually you have to pay a license, but not for use in ATmosphere. Whew!

Mike - don't know whether you were planning on buying him a present for Christmas of a games-making program :o) but if not.........I have 3DGameSTudio Commercial, but changed to Atmosphere some time ago. I know it's possible to transfer licenses, I've seen people talking about it on the 3DGS forum - it's just a question of informing Conitech. I've lost my broadband connection for the next week or so, but I'd happily forward 3DGS for him, and transfer the license, if you think he'd use it. It's just been wasted for the last year, so I'd rather give it to someone who'd get some getting some enjoyment from it - it's a fun program.

3DGS is a very good introduction as well - Introductory level only $49, very active forums, upgrade in steps to Commercial and Pro level. The ability to make click together games is a great morale-booster at the start, for anyone not used to 3d creation, and scripts. http://www.conitec.net/a4info.htm

bluetone - 'fraid I don't have video editing capabilities. I had hoped that Carrara Studio2.1 alone would allow me to make .swfs and gifs for use in Atmosphere (I have Flash Image Builder, which converts animated gifs, avis etc to swf). I guess I'll just have to forget about transparent backgrounds - it sounds way beyond my capabilities LOL. I wonder why that option for setting black as transparent (with gifs) is inactive? That would be pretty useful.

That sounds promising! thanks!

Makes it sound like I'll give it a miss! ROTFL When rendering as animated gif, I could see an option for setting black as transparent, but it was greyed out.

Great tips in this thread. I've learned a lot just by reading through! Thanks guys :o}